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Given that the Swedish film of Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is pretty damn good, was it really necessary for Hollywood to weigh in with its own version?

Of course. Not to do so would be leaving money on the table.

There are millions of Americans who have devoured Larsson’s mega-best-selling book – and the rest of his trilogy – who would never dream of submitting themselves to a Swedish movie with subtitles. That same mass audience would dearly love to see a movie version – and there are millions more who woud watch it without even reading the books.

So the question is not why Hollywood would make its own version; rather, the “duh” question is – why wouldn’t they? Not to do so seems counterintuitive.

Which is why we now are confronted with David Fincher’s version of the Larsson novel. But Fincher, aside from a few visual fillips, has not cracked this novel in a new way or plumbed it for previously undiscovered depths. His visual approach is different, but not so much that the material seems newly revealed.

Is Fincher’s film better than Niels Arden Oplev’s? Not really. It’s different; it’s probably as good as the Swedish version. But better? Nope, sorry – which brings us back to the issue of the movie as a commodity, rather than an artistic vision.

I’m not impugning Fincher’s intentions; I’m just saying that, as good as his film may be, it’s redundant and unnecessary.

Is it entertaining and well-made? Absolutely. For the audience that would never dream of seeing a foreign film, this movie will be the last word in “Dragon Tattoo” movie-making. And they’ll get a quality product.

Working from a script by Steve Zaillian (who made a few different choices than the writers for the Swedish film did in distilling Larsson’s sprawling novel), Fincher wastes no time getting into the nuts-and-bolts of the plot. It is initially a parallel set of stories: one involving a journalist named Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), the other focusing on a punk computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara – and that character’s last name is pronounced suh-LAHN-der).

Blomkvist runs a left-wing magazine called Millennium – and has just been convicted of libeling an international corporate head, after being fed false information. Was it a set-up? It doesn’t matter; he lost and it’s going to cost him his life savings and, perhaps, sink the magazine. Then he gets a financial lifeline: an offer to work for an aging industrialist named Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer). The cover story is that Blomkvist is writing Vanger’s memoirs; in fact, Vanger wants Blomkvist to employ his investigative skills to solve a 40-year-old murder, of Vanger’s niece.

To vet Blomkvist, Vanger’s lawyer hires a security firm, which employs its top investigator for the case: Salander. A tattooed, much-pierced loner, Salander has problems of her own: She’s been declared incapable of handling her own affairs because of her allegedly wild youth, and so is a ward of the state. But the guardian who has taken a lenient hand in her affairs suffers a stroke – and she winds up instead under the authority of an attorney (Yorick van Wageningen), who trades her access to her own funds for sexual favors – brutal ones. He quickly learns why she has a wasp tattooed on her neck.

As Blomkvist delves into the past of the wretched Vanger family, he uncovers a variety of secrets and, eventually, stumbles upon a clue as to what happened to the missing niece. Eventually, he decides he needs a research assistant – and winds up hiring Salander, after learning that she had delved into his own life. They become a team that clicks, both professionally and personally, even as they zero in on the member of the vicious Vanger clan who may have the answer about Harriet.

Fincher crosscuts early on between Blomkvist and Salander, utilizing insidiously metronomic music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The music drives the editing by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, building tension even when the characters are doing something as simple as looking at photographs or surfing the web (obviously in pursuit of something, but still…).

A few quibbles about Fincher’s stylistic choices: Obviously, this is a work that is wholly identified with Sweden, its weather and its politics. So it makes sense to set it there. But the idea of having all of the characters speak English with Scandinavian accents – including the Norwegian Swedish Stellan Skarsgard and the Dutch van Wageningen – seems like an affectation.

Also: Early on, almost all of the newspaper and magazine headlines we see are in Swedish, though the news crawl on the 24-hour TV news stations are in English. And when Blomkvist and Salander go back to look at newspaper archives from the period of the niece’s murder and earlier, they find newspapers with English headlines. It’s a quibble. But still… And I won’t go into the way they’ve changed the climax of the mystery. It condenses the story slightly, but not at the expense of surprise.

And yet, as noted, this film feels, well, unnecessary. It’s a solid film – a well-made and highly suspenseful film. But I saw “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” last year. And it was just as good.

7 Responses to “‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’: Tat-too late”

I enjoy your reviews very much for the most part. However, I have to disagree on one point. Many people will not go near a foreign film or watch anything with subtitles (unfortunately for them). Therefore I think that it should not be threatening to anyone to have another version of a very good story made in a different language so that more people will see it. Not everyone reads books (that is unfortunate as well). The fact is that when people see movies based on books, they are more likely to go and read that book. If David Fincher has made a very good adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s novel (I haven’t seen it yet), then I can’t see how anyone can lose from this. I have a real problem with your label of “unnecessary”. You should evaluate the movie as good or not based on its own merits and nothing else.

How can you call yourself a critic and simply dismiss the film because there’s another version of it? You should review a film based on itself, and not the surrounding material. Honestly this left me with a bad taste in my mouth, because you actually seemed to appreciate the art Fincher created but you kept comparing it to outside sources that don’t mean shit when judging the films’ merit. By your logic, True Grit from last year should be dismissed as well. Not to mention; Scarface, Cape Fear, The Departed, The Fly, 3:10 to Yuma, Ocean’s 11, The Magnificent Seven, The Maltese Falcon, The Thing, and A Fistful of Dollars.

I am looking forward to seeing Fincher’s version but am very much in agreement in the point you are making…Very good original, it does seem very much in the typical “lets make more money” Hollywood-mode. I wish people who actually did read the book would take the time to just read subtitles, it would make everyone’s film going experience so much richer to explore less populist foreign language films that are so excellent.

I know that Norway has been and is still in the news but you really need to get your fact straight. Stellan Skarsgård is Swedish, not Norwegian. He was born in Gothenburg, Västra Götalands län, Sweden.

I loved the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo! The films story is very exciting and puzzling (for those that haven’t read the book) and the pace is steady with some really tense situations. The investigation part of the story is excellent. Although it is 2.5 hours long it is never boring.

The soundtrack was also very fitting and helped to set the mood of the film. This is far above any other Scandinavian thriller production, and I look forward to the rest of the films/series.